Frankenreads

Visoka škola tehničkih strukovnih studija - Čačak

- Frankenstein

Frankenreads

Welcome to Frankenreads!

Join us for the following events to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! All events are free and open to the campus community! We welcome all other visitors!

Events

Franken-robots

Franken-robots will be designed by students and visitors. Materials used for the design are various devices and gadgets, electrical wires, valves, shafts, diodes, chips and other.The workshop will try to demystify the border delineating a human interference in a robot-like machine-making. Materials and computers for the workshop are provided. All models will be displayed on the Frankenbition & arts exhibition the next day.

Franken-book covers

Franken-book covers will be designed by students and visitors in the workshop. The workshop will explore the idea of what defines the relationship between technology and humanity, related to the phenomenon of ‘Frankenstein‘.The outcomes will include solutions in vector and software bitmap graphics (Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel Draw). Materials and computers for the workshop are provided. All models will be displayed on the Frankenbition & arts exhibition the next day.

Franken-IT

Franken-IT workshop will deal with WEB and animation design. Computer arts solutions (video, video game) will also be included. All events and resources of the project will be available on the website www.vstss.com/frankenreads.

Materials and computers for the workshop are provided. All models will be displayed on the Frankenbition & arts exhibition the next day.

Frankenbition

Frankenbition – Opening of the exhibit of miscellaneous art and design artefacts (book covers, comics, posters) entitled Frankenbition designed by TCC students and visitors, inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel. Animation, IT solutions and robots will also be included.

The exhibition will present the works exploring the idea of what defines the relationship between technology and humanity.

Frankenstein 200 years after

Frankenstein 200 years after: a question of authorship - A dramatic enactment of an imaginary interview with Mary Shelley on the success of her novel. Dramatization in English, with students actors in 18th century scene and costume.

Updates

Who was Mary Shelley and what inspired Frankenstein?

By Ivana Krsmanović | Frankenreads | October 17, 2018

When Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was 18, she had a dream that would change her life.

It was during 1815, “the year without a summer”, when the eruption of Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora became the largest known volcanic eruption in history, sending the climate across Europe haywire.

On holiday in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with poets Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley (her future husband) and the physician John Polidori, Shelley and the group entertained themselves indoors by reading from a book of ghost stories. Afterwards, Byron set a challenge: they would each write their own ghost stories and vote for the winner.

Shelley based hers on a dream, writing through the voice of her protagonist: “My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.”

Byron described her story as “a wonderful work for a girl” and she decided to make it into a novel. Two years later, in 1818, it was published.

Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus was an instant hit.

Meanwhile, Polidori’s story, The Vampyre, is said to have influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Shelley was the daughter of proto-feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneering 1792 text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and anarchistic philosopher William Godwin. She grew up around the London liberal elite.

But Wollstonecraft died when Mary was just a month old, and her father’s new wife was not interested in giving her a formal education. Instead, Shelley taught herself in between home schooling, reading books by her mother’s grave.

She was 16 when she met the the aspiring (and married) poet Percy Shelley and the pair fell in love. But her disapproving father cut her off, so the couple ran away and travelled around Europe.

A life peppered with tragedy, Shelley saw her first two children die at an early age, and suffered the suicide of her half sister. Not long after these losses, the couple went to Switzerland. It is thought the desire to bring back her loved ones inspired many themes in Frankenstein (Shelley’s description of the monster awakening reads more like a wish than a reality: “He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold”).

By the time Shelley finished the book, she was pregnant again.

A slam-dunk for a first book, Frankenstein is now one of the most popular gothic novels of all time, and it was written by a teenager. Not only that, it sparked an entirely new genre: science fiction, and an enduring character, the trope of the mad scientist.

Shelley’s novel tells of a scientist who creates a nameless monster out of cadavers. A metaphor for the danger of hubris, the monster goes on to kill.

It was considered such a masculine novel that when published anonymously (as was common for works written by women), many people attributed it to her husband.

But the Shelleys were mutually supportive in their work, both editing and promoting one another’s writing, and Percy Shelley’s notes were found on early editions of the book for this reason.

To this day, some still believe it could have been written by him.

This incorrect attribution of the novel is not the only blunder that surrounds it, either. Despite what many may think – and several pop-culture blunders – the eponymous Frankenstein is not the monster, but its creator Dr Victor Frankenstein. The monster of Shelley’s tale is in fact, nameless.

In 1910, the novel became the subject of one of the first horror films, Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein, and it has since inspired several other films (Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Young Frankenstein) and stage adaptations.

Percy Shelley drowned in In 1822 in the Gulf of Spezia. Following his death, the Frankenstein author continued to write, publishing four more novels, short stories, essays, biographies and travel writing as well as compiling collections of her late husband’s poetry.

The daughter of celebrated philosophers and the wife of a revolutionary poet, Mary Shelley more than made a name for herself and thrived without a formal education, becoming a trailblazing female writer in a genre still dominated by men today.